Development of a high-speed imaging system for real time evaluation and monitoring of cardiac engineered tissues.

Stem cell derived cardiac monolayers have high potential for tissue regeneration, drug testing and disease modeling. However, current differentiation protocols are still sub-optimal, resulting in cultures with variable yields and properties. We propose a high-speed lenseless imaging system, integrated with an electrical stimulation unit, to optimize the generation of these cultures.

Novel Analysis Method for Beating Cells Videomicroscopy Data: Functional Characterization of Culture Samples.

Cell culture of cardiac tissue analog is becoming increasingly interesting for regenerative medicine (cell therapy and tissue engineering) and is widely used for high throughput cardiotoxicity. As a cost-effective approach to rapidly discard new compounds with high toxicity risks, cardiotoxicity evaluation is firstly done requiring cells/tissue with physiological/pathological characteristics (close to properties). Studying multicellular electrophysiological and contractile properties is needed to assess drug effects.

Numerical modelling of birch pollen dispersion in Canada.

Simulating allergenic tree pollen is important to protect sensitive population and to support bioaerosols monitoring effort. Using the regional air quality model GEM-MACH, a simulation was conducted adopting two new main hypotheses: 1) the use of vertical correlation concept to force the vertical dispersion (a method normally used in tracer data assimilation) and, 2) the use of a puff instead of a continuous pollen release. The simulation was compared with pollen observations in Montreal and with the corresponding statistical forecasts (issued daily by the Weather Network) at several locations in the province of Quebec and elsewhere.

In silico study of multicellular automaticity of heterogeneous cardiac cell monolayers: Effects of automaticity strength and structural linear anisotropy.

The biological pacemaker approach is an alternative to cardiac electronic pacemakers. Its main objective is to create pacemaking activity from added or modified distribution of spontaneous cells in the myocardium. This paper aims to assess how automaticity strength of pacemaker cells (i.